[YesThatTom2]

The Linux being an illegal operating system is only a slight exaggeration of the FUD being put out by Microsoft at the time.

Any time Microsoft publicly talks about their love and support of Linux, someone in the room should point out their multi-pronged, multi-year, highly-funded, campaign to poison the well.

[xroche]

And we may remember the "Linux is a cancer" (https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_ca...), or more subtly the SCO "suicide attack" attack against open-source: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2563673/update--micros...

[david-cako]

Microsoft has been around a long time and they seem to adapt pretty rapidly. I wonder what percentage of the company today was around during Ballmer days, and how the culture has changed over time within the company. Naturally it's going to be driven by the market, but I wonder, are older MS folks moving with the culture shift? Or is it newer hires that are pushing for the open source ethos?

As a Mac and Linux user, I really like Microsoft these days. VSCode, WSL, Rust, containers, Surface, .NET Core, all are pretty sweet.

[moksly]

I think a lot of the culture of Microsoft remains the same as it was when Balmer left. As much as it’s fun to laugh at his “developers, developers, developers” sort of thing, his real legacy should probably how Microsoft formed its Business-2-Enterprise strategy under his rule.

When AWS first blew up they sort of struggled in European Enterprise because they originally went Google route or automating everything while taking a “our way or the high-way” attitude toward legalisation and localised agreements. This is basically why Azure was capable to fill the void that AWS was struggling to fill. Modern AWS has learned a lot from Kim that though, and are now ahead of Microsoft in many areas. I still can’t get a guarantee that only European citizens working in the EU will be the only people who work on my Azure cloud like I can from Amazon.

But as a whole, the sort of setup where I can call Redmond directly when shits hit the fan, and they will even give me hourly updates via phone until the issue has been resolved. That’s a Balmer sort of thing. And so is the financial aspect of how much more sense it makes to chose the Microsoft option once you’re already in bed with them. If anything that last hit has only grown under the new Microsoft.

I mean, how can I justify to my political leadership that I need to buy a Microsoft Teams competitor when it’s already included in our office365 setup? I can’t, and this just snowballs over time.

I’m not unhappy about this by the way. Through the past many decades Microsoft has been one of our best business partners as far as Tech goes. Which is very likely why AWS has adopted the approach.

[joejerryronnie]

I always thought it ironic that Linux killed Sun rather than Microsoft.

[Blammar]

Ex-Sun employee here. I'd be interested in your reasons for that statement.

[joejerryronnie]

Ok, here’s my layman’s take from being in the general vicinity at the time - let me know if this has any merit. Linux was billed as the Microsoft killer when it began to gain prominence, but it never made real inroads in the desktop market. It also turned out that orgs who had implemented MS Server products were not culturally or technically great candidates to shift their back office to a Unix-based OS. However, companies that had invested in top of the line Sun boxes (at a top of the line price point) were very intrigued at the prospect of running something on wintel architecture that may give them 70% of the benefit at 10% of the cost. Those companies were already invested in a Unix-based environment and when Redhat became popular and offered a corporate wrapper to Linux, it was the beginning of the end for Sun. The big data centers also realized they could just string together a bunch of wintel machines running linux and get the same performance as a huge Sun box at a fraction of the cost. The reason I find this ironic is because Sun was one of the largest proponents of open source software and the arguably most successful open source software ended up killing their market.

As an aside, my wife worked in M&A for Sun during the height of the dot com bubble and I attended some amazing acquisition parties all around the Bay.